Only The Moon
by I love Neville
Summary: The harvest moon shines down... Thenardier finds more than gold and trinkets while robbing the corpses at the barricade. I suck at summaries... Rated T to be safe, because of character death. Mostly musical based, but Azelma and the little boys are mentioned.


Only The Moon

Thenardier laughed to himself, clutching a gold watch in his long fingers. Wading in the blood and shit, he had found quite a few spoils, enough to feed his family for a few weeks. _In fact,_he thought, running his palm across the watch face to clean off the sewer muck, grinning in delight when he found it to still be ticking, _there may even be enough for dresses and shoes for the girls... _a familiar glint of greed appeared in his eye. _If I really haggle at the pawnshop, maybe we can even buy a bigger apartment, or another inn... If there's more left over, per'aps I'll tell 'Ponine to give some to Gavroche, I know he could use it, no matter what he says. _He smiled, thinking himself a very good father. He knew for a fact that if _he _had run away, his father wouldn't have cared, let alone tried to help him out. (Not that 'Vroche would accept anything from Thenardier, but that was besides the point, in his opinion. At least he was trying.) He shook his head, ridding any thoughts of his father. Instead, he focused on his bulging pockets. _Yeah, I can work with this. Gold and silver ain't cheap, and these students had more than enough of it..._**  
**His expression grew dark as he thought of the students who had supposedly cared so much about the poor. _If they had _**_really _**_cared about us, _he thought, prying a gold tooth from the mouth of a National Gaurdsman, _they would have started by giving all this to us. Lord knows we need it more than any of them _**_ever _**_did. _With a final heave and a grunt, the tooth came free, causing him to stumble backward into the muck. He emerged, however, with a triumphant look on his face, tooth gleaming in his hand. With a smirk, he put it into his pocket. Then he paused and listened, hearing something strange. Silence.**  
**He made his way through the sewers, looking up from a grate. His suspicions were confirmed when he saw no boots trampling overhead, and heard no shouting, crying or screaming. It seemed the police had left. He spent another hour in the sewers, just to make sure that the bodies had been picked clean, then he opened the grate and, squinting at the sudden flood of light, and looked around. He found himself at, what he assumed, was a barricade of some sort. It was relatively impressive, but he didn't care. He wasn't here to pay his respects, or wonder "What might have been..." He was here to scavenge and to steal, and he wasn't particularly ashamed of it. He started making his way through the junk, occasionally finding a small trinket worth more than just a sous or two, pocketing it.

A flash of red caught his eye, and he turned his head around to see a nice vest on a corpse with long blonde hair. He took the vest off the man and stuffed it into his satchel, then took notice of his companion, another corpse with messy black hair and broad shoulders. Flipping the man around, Thenardier was surprised to recognize his face.

Now it should be noted that, despite what his friends and acquaintances thought, Thenardier was human, and didn't particularly enjoy robbing bodies. However, he knew that there was profit to be had, so he would block out the faces and dig in. So, truthfully, it was astonishing that he paid attention to the man's face at all, but fate has a strange way of working out, and so Thenardier found himself slightly shocked to be holding the body of Grantaire. Honestly, Thenardier recalled speaking to him only a few times, mostly when they were both quite drunk, but he was an amiable fellow, and Thenardier was pleased when he found out that the man had befriended Gavroche, and, to a degree, Eponine. Though Grantaire was a drunk, it was Thenardier's personal opinion that the man was relatively intelligent, very funny, and that he made good conversation. Not only that, but the man was big and fiercely protective, and it made Thenardier strangely relieved to know that Gavroche had someone to protect him if there was ever anything that he really couldn't handle, in spite of his street-smarts and charm. (Not that he would have ever admitted that, of course.)

As he looked into the face of his son's dead friend, Thenardier felt his heart drop to his stomach. Surely Gavroche couldn't be here...? Or 'Ponine? He knew that she was borderline obsessed with that Pontmercy boy, and that he was among those who had planned to fight, but that didn't mean anything, did it? He waved the thought away, shaking his head yet again. No, they were Thenardiers, they were smarter than a handful of schoolboys with delusions of grandeur. He may not have been the greatest father, or even a very _good _one, but he knew that he had taught his children common sense,or, at the very least, they had inherited some. They wouldn't be here. 'Ponine was probably at home with Azelma, or wandering the streets, and Gavroche was probably in that ugly elephant statue, perhaps with those boys that Thenardier had seen trailing Gavroche as of late. (Come to think of it, they looked strangely familiar, he would have to ask his son about them...)

Setting Grantaire's body down, he forced himself to smile. They weren't here, he was sure of it. He looked over Grantaire's body, then decided against taking anything. It was doubtful that there was anything of much value on him, anyway.

He left the barricade soon after, learning from a woman wiping blood off her step that the rest of the bodies were lined up close by. He hoped that nobody was watching the bodies, it would be a lot easier to loot them. If there was someone else there, he could always pick the richest looking one and pretend to a grieving father, fling himself at the body, taking a few things from the pockets. There was less profit and less dignity to do it that way, but he had stopped caring about his dignity a while ago, and a little profit was better than none at all.

When he reached the bodies, he was happy to see that nobody was guarding them. He supposed that they weren't _worth _guarding, honestly, and that the police would be more occupied. He knelt down and started going through the pockets of a boy with wavy, chestnut hair. He went on to the next boy, and the next, until he reached a rather small body. He almost didn't notice it; not because he didn't care, but because he wasn't paying attention. Like always, he had not been looking at the faces, or really anything except the trinkets he found.

But as he reached towards the vest of the body near him, he noticed its size, compared to his hand. A sudden fear chilled his spine like ice. _There must have been children at the barricade, right? That doesn't necessarily mean it's him... that doesn't mean that it's- _He forced the thought out of his mind, as if simply thinking it would make it true.

_Look at his face. _Thenardier, still looking at his hands, was surprised to find himself thinking that. _It's the only way you'll know. Look at his face. _

He wanted desperately to argue back to the voice in his head, convince himself that there was really no need to look at the corpse's face, but even as he was protesting, he found his eyes examining the cold, pale face of his son.

He didn't cry or shout, he didn't whimper or curse, he just continued look into Gavroche's glassy eyes until he found he couldn't continue, and he wrenched his eyes away. As he looked away, his gaze fell on the body next to the boy. No, it couldn't be-

Lying right next to her little brother, with blood staining her blouse and a small smile on her face, was Eponine. She was dressed as a boy, and covered in dirt and blood, but he would know his little girl anywhere. His 'Ponine...

As Thenardier looked at the bodies of his two children, he felt words rise up in his throat. Words he had rarely told them in life, words like, "I'm sorry" and "I love you." When was the last time that he had told them how proud he truly was of them?

_Never. _Running his fingers through his red curls, he grimaced at the realization. He knew that, by some miracle, his children were _good_. He and his wife weren't sure how or why, as they knew and accepted that they weren't, but their children were kind and hopeful, with more morals each than both of their parents put together.

And in that moment, as he looked at his children, he felt genuine _guilt. _Not for his cons and crimes, not for anything he could have been jailed or fined for, but for the words he never said. He felt guilt for the times he raised his hand against 'Ponine, the times he didn't chase Gav and tell him to come back home. For the times he didn't ask his daughter what was wrong when she came home crying, or ask his son if he was hungry or cold when he saw him begging on the streets. He regretted forcing Azelma to punch through a window in the hopes of receiving more money, he wished he had never given his two youngest sons away. He wished he had been a better father.

But above all, he wished that his two children, who were lying cold and stiff in front of him, could hear him, wherever they were. Thenardier tried to say all these things out loud, in the hopes that 'Ponine and Gav would hear, and know, but the lump in his throat prevented any noise from escaping his lips except a strangled sob. Grasping the hands of his two children, he took a deep breath and managed to whisper, "I'm sorry. You deserved better."

Taking a deep breath, he rose to his feet, grabbed his satchel, and started trudging home, never taking his eyes off of the moon.

**Author's Note: Oh, god, I'm almost crying. The last few paragraphs were harder to write than I anticipated. Anyway, I know that this might seem really out of character, but bare with me. My theory is that the Thenardiers, despite what we see of them, actually care for each other. (Look at Master of the House in the movie. _Look at it! _They are adorable to 'Ponine, and have so many cute moments together! It shows that they really _do _care about each other.) They don't know how to show it, though, and they all have these tempers and mean streaks that make it seem like they hate each other. I haven't read the book, I just know about it from the internet, (I'm reading it now, but I'm not very far into it.) but I'm pretty sure that in the book, the Thenardiers are just terrible people. (Not the kids, mind you, but Madame and Monsieur for sure.) Other than the mentions of Azelma and the two unnamed Thenardier boys, this is all musical-based. The Thenardiers are based on Sacha Baron-Cohen and Helena Bonham-Carter, 'Ponine is (mostly) ased on Smantha Barks and Gav is based on Daniel Huttlestone. (I thought that the casting there was so perfect, they ARE the Thenardier family.) Grantaire's design is a mixture of George Blagden and the Shojo Cosette anime Grantaire. (Shuddup, I liked his design...)**

**Anyway, please review, and feel free to PM me with any questions!**


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